This Water-Powered Trike Goes 0-62 MPH in 0.55 Seconds

This is our kind of hydrogen power.

A French madman names François Gissy likes to build crazy bikes and his latest creation might be his craziest yet. It’s a rocket trike powered by a big tank of compressed air and rainwater. That doesn’t sound like a great vehicle propellant, but it rocketed this strange little trike from 0-62 mph in just 0.55 seconds and hit a top speed of 162 mph at the Circuit Paul Ricard in Le Castellet, France.

The crazy stats don’t end there. The 0-62 mph time for this water trike is impressive enough, but even more mind-boggling is the fact that it went 60 feet in just 0.852 milliseconds. That’s less than one one-thousandth of a second. In those first 60 feet, Gissy was pulling an average of 5.138 g.

The video opens with François Gissy watering some flowers with the water tank on his trike. Then we see it on the track ready for action. A large stream of water suddenly sprays from the tank getting one of the cameras all wet and rocketing the trike up to speed. Gissy’s head noticeably jerks back on launch as you might imagine it would from pulling over 5 g. Adding some sort of seat back or headrest for preventing whiplash might have been a good move, but the seat on this trike appears to just be the water tank itself.

We don’t know where the chassis or front end of this experiment were sourced from as it all looks very homemade, but we can see four-pot Brembo disc brakes up front giving this water trike some much-needed stopping power.

At the end of the video, we see the water trike being ridden at a much more casual pace followed by more of Gissy watering flowers. The Honda Clarity and Toyota Mirai are great and all, but this looks like a much more fun form of hydrogen power.